Services such as Google Maps are capable of displaying street level images of geographic locations. These images, identified in Google Maps as “Street Views”, typically comprise photographs of buildings and other features and allow a user to view a geographic location from a person's perspective as compared to a top-down map perspective.
These services may also employ various techniques to identify businesses located in the street level images. For example, human operators may identify businesses, images may be scanned using OCR in order to identify businesses or building numbers, or by matching images of known businesses, such as real estate images, to the street level images. These efforts have been used to map a point of interest (“POI”) to a street level image of the POI. The mapping links the POI to an image which is associated with a particular yaw, pitch, and zoom.
These services may also provide turn by turn directions to the POI. These systems include handheld GPS devices or mobile phones, vehicle-mounted devices, or Internet-based computers with access to websites such as Google Maps. Users input one or more locations and receive a route and turn-by-turn directions based on the order of inputted locations. The user may follow the turn-by-turn directions to reach the one or more locations.
However, many of the map locations of the points of interest may actually be significantly inaccurate. The location information for a particular POI may be based on user input or information from third parties or may be approximated based on the distance along a roadway. For example, if the service knows that a particular city block contains 5 addresses, the service may approximate the location of these addresses based on the length of the city block. In that regard, a user may identify an address of interest, but the map service may return a location dozens of meters away from the actual location of the address.